rtts/Debian

A complete, minimalist Debian setup for power users

This repository contains the exact configuration of all my workstations, gaming computers, laptops and even a couple of VPSes. Of course, your situation will differ, but I believe the installation instructions and Ansible roles contained herein will be a great starting point for anyone who wants to enjoy using a minimalist setup to its maximum potential.

FAQ

Is this a GNU/Linux distribution?

Yes, it kind of is! Except that all that I'm distributing is a bunch of Ansible roles and the installation instructions. Think of this as a dotfiles repository that also includes the playbook to install the dotfiles.

Why should I use this instead of distribution X?

You should not use this at all, this system is tailored exactly to my own needs and nothing more. However, you may find some configuration gems here that you can use in your own setup. Find an old laptop or spin up a VM and give it a try if you want to see how a fellow GNU/Linux enthusiast has configured their computer!

How can I install it?

Keep reading! This README contains all the steps needed to install Debian, set up the base system, and run the Ansible playbook that will take care of the remaining configuration.

The starting point

Let's return to the source and start with a minimal, vanilla Debian installation. Visit Debian.org and click "Download", then write the image to a USB flash drive with:

sudo dd if=debian-12.8.0-amd64-netinst.iso of=/dev/sdX

Make sure you substitute X with the correct letter of your USB drive). Then, do your best to reboot your computer in such a way that you arrive at the following screen:

Hurrah! The hardest part – getting your computer to successfully boot from a USB stick – is over! Note that the screenshot says "BIOS mode", but if you manage to boot the "UEFI Installer menu" that is probably even better. The second hardest part is choosing a hostname for the new system. Get your inspiration at https://namingschemes.com/.

Carefully follow the installation instructions and choose the partitioning method "Use entire disk and set up encrypted LVM" for maximum security. At the "Set up users and passwords" prompt, supply an empty password for the root user and create an initial user account. This account will be given the power to become root using the sudo command. One day, I will add a Debian Preseed to this repository which will make all this happen automatically.

At the end of the installation you'll see this:

Select nothing except for "SSH Server" and "standard system utilities". After the installation is complete, boot into the new system and log in using the username and password you have set during installation. There is no graphical environment, yet, but be patient because we'll configure the important things first.

Note

Even when you have configured a WiFi connection during the installation, the resulting system may not have WiFi.

One way to solve this is to boot the installer again and enter "Rescue mode", follow the steps to get a root shell, and install NetworkManager with apt install network-manager.

Then, remove the USB drive, reboot into your system and execute: nmcli dev wifi connect <Your WiFi name> password <Your WiFi password>

Give yourself (remote) access

On the target computer, run:

$ sudo apt install libnss-mdns

On the target computer or another computer, run:

$ ssh-copy-id <hostname>.local

Finally, on the target computer, run:

$ sudo visudo

And change the line containing %sudo to:

%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

This is everything that's required to run the Ansible playbook from this repository, which will take care of the rest of the installation.

Run the playbook

On either the target computer or on another computer, install Git and Ansible and clone this repository:

$ sudo apt install git ansible
$ git clone https://github.com/rtts/debian
$ cd debian

The playbook is divided into a number of hosts, with each host having a number of roles. The roles are meant to be composable, so you can, for example, configure a host with the common and X roles for use as a media player.

For now, however, let's assume you are setting up a personal computer that is in your physical possesion, such as a laptop or a desktop computer. Open the file inventory.ini and add your hostname to the [workstations] section and, if it's a laptop, to the [laptops] section. If you want the system to be able to send and receive email, provide your email credentials (optional).

Now run the playbook!

$ ./playbook.yml

Using the system

Congratulations! Your system has been fully set up for general use, After the system boots, you will be greeted with the following message of the day:

This message is shown in rxvt-unicode displayed by the tiling window manager xmonad. A single terminal is automatically launched at startup. You can specify which program(s) launch at startup by editing ~/.xsession. Also have look at the other dotfiles that were installed.

Note

All dotfiles (except .bashrc) are placed by Ansible with the force parameter set to false, which means that local changes will not be overwritten when you re-run the playbook. The dotfiles are also written to the /etc/skel directory, so they will be installed for new users created by adduser. This is also a convenient location to check for updates to dotfiles.

Here are some useful keyboard shortcuts (note: Mod is mapped to the windows key by the X role):

• Mod Shift Enter opens a new terminal.
• Mod [1-9] switches to the virtual desktop 1 through 9.
• Mod P launches dmenu. Type the starting letters of a graphical program, such as chromium or firefox and press Enter to launch it.
• Mod Tab cycles between the windows on the current virtual desktop.
• Mod Space switches between fullscreen and tiled window layouts.
• Mod Enter moves a window to the top of the window stack.
• When in tiled layout, Mod , and Mod . do something useful that's hard to explain. Try it out!
• To change the size of tiled windows, Mod H and Mod L You can also change the size of any window by holding Mod and drag it using the right mouse button.
• Dragging a window while holding the Mod key will make it floating. You can make it tiled again with Mod T.

You can view all available keybindings with Mod Shift /.

More possibilities

Here are the things that I use this setup for:

Web browsing

The playbook has installed the web browsers Chromium and Firefox. Personally, I like to edit /etc/chromium.d/default-flags to add the --incognito flag so that Chromium will always browse incognito, and then use Firefox for all my non-incognito browsing.

Both browsers include uBlock Origin through the webext-ublock-origin-* Debian packages. I have also heard good things about the Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension so you might want to give that a try. The recently introduced Total Cookie Protection sounds very promising.

I highly recommend setting your default search engine to DuckDuckGo so you have access to their incredible Bang syntax. In practice, however, most of my web searches still use the !g bang to search Google.

Email

Email configuration is split up into two roles:

1. mailserver
2. mailclient

The mailserver role configures Exim4 to send all outgoing emails through a smarthost of your choosing, solving the mystery of xkcd 838:

The mailclient role installs mutt for a single user only, assuming that user is you. Launch it by typing mutt at the command line and be amazed at the usability of it. It has a lengthy manual, but for basic usage all you need is the arrow keys and the following shortcuts:

• m: Send new email
• r: Reply to the current email
• t: Mark the current email for deletion/archival
• d: Delete the marked emails
• A: Archive the marked emails

Lego CAD

I use LDCad to create building instructions for my Lego models. It's closed-source, but I've emailed the author and he's assured me he would open source it before his death. You can also install leocad and ldraw-parts from the Debian repositories. For more information visit LDraw.org.

Photography

I use Geeqie (apt install geeqie) to cull the photos after a shoot, then use darktable (apt install darktable) to post-process them. Finally, I use Photog! (pip install photog) to generate my photography website.

Audio

I use Audacity (apt install audacity) to record high-quality audio using a Focusrite Scarlet 2i2, which works phenomenally well under Linux and PulseAudio. All I needed to do was plug the device in and attach speakers, and all audio was routed correctly by default.

Video

Have a look at FFTok for some handy ffmpeg shortcuts to cut, split, crop, scale, combine and transcode video files.

Programming

The terminal-first computing environment configured by this playbook naturally lends itself well to all kinds of programming. Try for example Bash, Python, Perl, Ruby, or Haskell (I dare you to edit the xmonad configuration file!).

Media

mpv is included in the X role by default. Read man mpv to find out all the available options of this grand successor to mplayer.

Streaming services work in Firefox after enabling DRM but not in Chromium, because it lacks the required Widevine DRM. Please fight for alternatives to DRM.

Gaming

If you're a gamer, you probably want to install the Steam Client even though it's not open source. Personally I like playing titles that are available on the Internet Archive, using my own custom games launcher for DOSBox that will automatically download and run a large number of MS-DOS games. Here's how to install and run it:

$ sudo apt install dosbox
$ pip install ialauncher
$ ialauncher --no-fullscreen

The --no-fullscreen argument is there because xmonad will already tile the IA Launcher window to be fullscreen. Alternatively, you can add your computer to the gamestations group to configure it as a gaming kiosk.

Kiosks

The kiosks group only installs the common and X roles intended for single-use setups, such as:

• Digital signage
• Public library
• Media player

You can turn your computer into a locked down Chromebook by adding the following to the end of ~/.xsession:

exec chromium --kiosk

Work

To satisfy my employer's ISO 27001 requirement, the screens of all workstations are set to lock after 15 minutes of inactivity. This is accomplished with xautolock, which is officially hosted by one of the first web sites on the internet: http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/X11/screensavers/. To get rid of the auto-locking behavior, remove the file /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90custom_autolock and restart X with Mod Shift Q.

It's possible to configure mutt to connect to an Exchange server, but according to the linked blog:

get yourself a beer, this will probably take a couple of hours to set up

Maintenance

Like any operating system, Debian publishes regular updates. Make it a habit to run the following commands regularly:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade